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The Human Machine – Its Care and Repair 1947 and 1958 Versions
Published in Let’s Live, 1958.
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1947
Collier’s, of March 15, 1947, carried an article by J. D. Ratcliffe entitled “Block That Stroke.” It showed how a deficiency of one fraction of the vitamin C complex could result in a cerebral hemorrhage or other capillary breakdown that is common in patients over fifty years of age.
The factor described is known as rutin, first found in garden rue, later in tobacco and then in buckwheat. It was a member of the family of vitamin substances first found in association with ascorbic acid by Dr. Szent-Gyorgi (who received the Nobel prize for his identification of that substance as vitamin C), as members of the vitamin C complex responsible for protection against the capillary breakdown symptoms common to scurvy. (Szent-Gyorgi found the pure ascorbic acid useless as a remedy for this primary lesion that identifies scurvy. It might be reasonably said that without this essential fraction, no preparation of ascorbic acid could properly be called vitamin C).
In old botanical references, garden rue and buckwheat were listed as remedies for erysipelas, gangrenous ulcers, and to increase resistance to infectious disease. (Erysipelas is a capillary disease, in which capillary breakdown is aggravated by infection, with no specific infective agent responsible.)
In our experiments with buckwheat, we made tablets of the whole dried juice, instead of refining out the rutin factor in its pure state. As a result, we found evidence of better clinical results than were obtainable with the purified rutin, particularly where headaches resulting from hypertension were being treated.
A parallel investigation had been going on as to the effect of aqueous extracts of rice in high blood pressure. We soon found that aqueous extracts of barley or buckwheat would also favorably influence most cases of hypertension. (Rutin alone is known to be useless for this purpose). So the next logical step was to add this factor to the juice concentrate, so that the same product would not only control the capillary damage aggravated by hypertension, but also tend to reduce the hypertension.
The next stage of the investigation is very interesting. It was found that the buckwheat product if taken by young subjects had no observable effect until enough was used to cause an adverse reaction, a feeling of fatigue and lowered vitality just as found in HYPOTENSION. (This was found to be actually HYPOTENSION).
Next, we found that older subjects at first had a very pleasant and invigorating reaction that lasted a week or so. Then, especially if the dosage were stepped up, a definite feeling of LOWERED stamina, HYPOTENSION again.
Still older persons required two or three weeks of use of Buckwheat extract to reach this stage, some hypertensives never reached it.
WHAT IS THE EXPLANATION? We think it is this: There are organic factors in plants (chlorophyll is one, in our experience not too effective) that definitely eliminate cholesterol. Cholesterol accumulation in the tissues is the commonest explanation offered for hypertension and other symptoms of aging.
We begin to suffer tissue degeneration at the age of 28, the peak point of a prize-fighter. Therefore, a person below this age cannot get any benefit from the use of a cholesterol-eliminating agent. He would in fact get adverse effects, for cholesterol is one factor that is necessary to maintain a proper permeability of capillaries, too little no doubt would result in too great a leakage of fluids from the blood vessels into the lymph channels and cause lowered blood pressure, even to a level below normal, just as taking in too much sugar will upset the sugar balances temporarily of the body fluids.
In the older person the removal of excess cholesterol would act to cause the improved feeling of vigor, continuing until the surplus cholesterol is removed, after which a continuance certainly could be expected to cause the same untoward reaction as it would in a young person. Just as if a person were starving for sugar, heavy ingestion of sugar would conduce to well being until the body requirements were satisfied, after which the input would have to be reduced to the quantity consumed by the tissues in normal activity.
Cholesterol may be compared to the effect of carbon in the automobile engine. A new engine does not function well until the pores of the metal in the cylinder walls and rings are sealed with the carbon of fuel combustion. (This is a part of the well-known breaking-in process). Later on, the same carbon further accumulates and clogs the ring grooves, and oil ducts, fills the combustion chamber and gums up the valve stems. Carbon solvents must be used, or a complete dismantling and cleaning becomes necessary.
The human machine has much the same problem in the case of cholesterol. Physicians have long searched for a cholesterol eliminator that is safe. Here is one that has been right under our nose, and must be a physiological answer to this problem if our theories are sound, which we believe them to be.
1958
No reasonable person objects to paying a repairman for a job well done. But, most of us object to throwing good money after bad when the job is not done right. When Mother Nature created the human machine, she intended that very few repairs would be necessary. However, untold millions are spent annually on the repair of our ailing human machinery. Very little is invested in the care of this same machine. Since disease is a natural reaction to an unnatural environment, would it not be wiser to improve the environment?
Honest Doctors of Cheshire
Necessity is the mother of invention. Anyone who has lived in Cheshire, England can tell you how necessity created a situation requiring an “invention” which produced remarkable changes in the health status. It was in Cheshire that 600 doctors were obliged to treat people rather than illness…to prevent disease rather than treat its symptoms. James Horty and N. Philip Norman, M.D., in their book Tomorrow’s Food, in the chapter entitled “Honest Doctors of Cheshire,” tell what happened when the doctors of that town were faced with the problem of accurately diagnosing the illnesses before them or of working harder with no increase in income. Under the National Health Insurance Act each of the 600 doctors on the Cheshire panel was paid so much per capita for the care of the patients in his charge. An increase in sickness among his patients brought no increase of income to the doctor. It brought only an increase of work and loss of sleep.
An Accurate Diagnosis
The Cheshire doctors did more than merely utter a cry of desperation or defeat. Their medical testament reports systematic and successful attempts by panel doctors, not merely to improve the diets of their patients, but to reconstruct the whole food economy and food culture of the Villagers they served all the way from the soil on which the food was grown to the kitchen. As a result, these doctors who had become disillusioned and impatient with the endless repair type of therapy, turned with something like religious enthusiasm to the building of health and the results they could show. Their subsequent enthusiasm was understandable because their diagnosis was correct.
Twilight Health
Why is it so hard to understand the seriousness of our health plight? The reason is simply that people in this country have come to accept the word “sick” as meaning that the body is incapacitated and unable to perform normally. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Merely being able to walk and work, to get in your car and ride to the store, or turn a few spades of dirt in your garden once a week, does not mean that you are well. It simply means that your body is able to function within certain limits–limits which have been made comfortable by a civilization devoted to producing a life of ease. If, on the other hand, sickness were judged on the basis of ability to perform, we would find quite another picture. A healthy person should be able to walk five or 10 miles with only moderate fatigue. The healthy person should be able to dig in the garden all day without sore muscles. The healthy person should be happy, enthusiastic about life and able to sleep comfortably and soundly.
Restoration Assured
What can we do to improve our mental and physical well-being? First, select plain, simple foods for our diet. Eat plenty of the staples, brown rice, potatoes, fresh vegetables, both raw and cooked, including the green leafy vegetables, bread made from fresh ground whole wheat. Fresh raw fruit and vegetable juices can be made daily with a juicer or liquefier. Second, avoid those foods which have been processed, bleached, refined, hydrogenated or pasteurized, and those which are preserved by chemical additives. Third, use sugars and starches in moderation, avoiding entirely refined sugar. Fourth, do not use hydrogenated or otherwise chemically treated oils; use only natural oils such as cold pressed sesame oil, peanut oil and soybean oil.
As the Twig is Bent
Nature can utilize only the materials it is given to work with. The only food fit for the human body is that created by the vital forces which produce life itself. The internal environment is just as receptive to change by use of natural nourishment as the external environment is receptive to change, for example, by furnaces which warm our homes.
So why complain of a faulty human economy if you are not giving your body proper materials to work with? From the moment that your body begins receiving what nature intended it to have, restoration begins and age makes no difference. Many people who have been sickly and ailing at 60 years of age have, by changing their eating habits, produced a vital health picture at 80 and lived to die a natural death well over 90 years of age.
A Lost Art
A human machine keeps running until the tearing down processes occur faster than the building up processes. When this happens, degeneration occurs. The great curse of our modern civilized eating habits is premature degeneration. Dr. Thomas Parren, Surgeon-General of the United States Health Service, brought this point home to officialdom by stating that improved nutritional standards “would add 10 years to the virile life span of the average human being.” That is probably an understatement, but men in Dr. Perren’s position must lean to conservatism. In the battle for health the side of simple, natural foods took a terrible loss with the invention of machinery which changed the internal environment without thought of consequences. The lost art of self-healing by living correctly needs to be restored because the lesions to our tissues continue as long as we maintain the ostrich-like attitude of ignoring the facts.